A speech application is one of the most challenging applications to develop, deploy and maintain in a communications environment. Expertise required for developing and deploying a viable VXML application, for example, includes expertise in computer telephony integration (CTI) hardware and software or a data network telephony (DNT) equivalent, voice recognition software, text-to-speech software, and speech application logic.
With the relatively recent advent of voice extensive markup language (VXML) the expertise require to develop a speech solution has been reduced somewhat. VXML is a language that enables a software developer to focus on the application logic of the voice application without being required to configuring underlying telephony components. Typically, the developed voice application is run on a VXML interpreter that resides on and executes on the associated telephony system to deliver the solution.
Voice prompting systems in use to day range from a simple interactive voice response system for telephony to the more state-of-art VXML application system known to the inventors. Anywhere a customer telephony interface may be employed, there may also be a voice interaction system in place to interact with callers in real time. Data network telephony (DNT) equivalents of voice delivery system also exist like VoIP portals and the like.
Often in both VXML compliant and non-VXML systems, such as computer telephony integrated (CTI) IVRs, voice messaging services and the like, voice prompts are sometimes prerecorded in a studio setting for a number of differing business scenarios and uploaded to the enterprise system server architecture for access and deployment during actual interaction with clients. Pre-recording voice prompts instead of dynamically creating them through software and voice synthesis methods is many times performed when better sound quality, different languages, different voice types, or a combination of the above are desired for the presentation logic of a particular system.
In very large enterprise architectures there may be many thousands of prerecorded voice prompts stored for use by a given voice application. Some of these may not be stored in a same centralized location. One with general knowledge of voice file management will attest that managing such a large volume of voice prompts can be very complicated. For example, in prior-art systems management of voice prompts includes recording the prompts, managing identification of those prompts and manually referencing the required prompts in the application code used in developing the application logic for deployment of those prompts to a client interfacing system. There is much room for error in code referencing and actual development, recording, and sorting batches of voice files can be error prone and time consuming as well.
What is clearly needed is a system for managing voice prompts used by a voice interaction system that can solve the problems stated above.